


Of All The Places To Be Sent

by Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody



Series: Windmills & Windowsills [4]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: M/M, Scala ad Caelum (Kingdom Hearts)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2020-01-01 05:37:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18329690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody/pseuds/Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody
Summary: After ten months of training and studying, it's nice to get a change of scenery, however marginal that change may be.





	Of All The Places To Be Sent

**Author's Note:**

> There's nothing like slapping some Latin vocab into your story and pretending it's wicked deep.

Scala is a uniform place. Blue skies, blue waters, and a network of artificial islands between them. These towns are roughly the same size, the same shape, and have the same overall color scheme: white. Some gold. Occasionally a third accent color, adorning the banners and rooftops and windmills. Each island is crowned with a distinct and unique tower, but other than that, there isn’t much variation.

Xehanort and Eraqus’s town, Abitus, is particularly large, but after living there for ten months, the gilded features and wrought iron fences start to give Xehanort the impression of a birdcage. When he’s on the lower tiers, the rest of the town looms over him. But the higher he goes, the more the streets begin to bottleneck, until it feels like even the sky is pressing in. And there are only so many windowside chess games he can play before he starts to get restless.

So, on one of their rare days off, he and Eraqus decide to take a trip to the neighboring island of Hortus. It’s as similar to Abitus as any other town, but it has more variation in plant life, more flower species if you know where to look. And it’s only a twenty-minute ride, with the gondola taking them through the sky at a gentle crawl.

After eighteen minutes of travel time and still no town in sight, Eraqus finally notices something amiss. “Wait,” he says, pointlessly. “I think we’re heading east.” He presses against the window and cranes his neck to find the sun. It’s almost directly overhead, but leaning just enough to one side to confirm his suspicions. He sits down again with his brow furrowed in a confused pout. “Where are they sending us? You _did_ tell the conductor we were going to Hortus, right?”

Xehanort gives him a flat look, refusing to believe that this is somehow _his_ fault, at least until they know for sure. Besides, there’s nothing they can do but wait and see where the gondola will end up delivering them. Thankfully, it’s not much longer before a town appears ahead. Once they’re close enough to make out the shape of the tower—two steeples, bonded by a single roof, from which a huge slab of metal hangs straight down the center—Eraqus starts to laugh. “Oh, you are _kidding me_.”

“What?” Xehanort asks, already sensing that information is being withheld from him. But Eraqus just shakes his head and says, “You’ll see.”

They glide up to the platform and disembark, and when Xehanort reads the welcome sign for the town of Ortus, he rolls his eyes at himself as much as at Eraqus. “All right. Honest mistake.”

“Oh, no. This is on _you_ ,” Eraqus says. “You need to work on your enunciation. It’s _Hortus_ , with an ‘H.’” Xehanort tries to wave him off, but Eraqus reaches out and takes his face in one hand. “C’mon, _how_ long have you been living here?” he teases, smushing his cheeks obnoxiously. “Say it with me: _Hooorrrtusss_.”

Xehanort can barely open his mouth without laughing, and he swats Eraqus’s hand away. Eraqus chuckles while Xehanort massages his jaw and has a look around. “Well…it’s not what we planned, but we might as well hang out for a while, I guess.”

“It’s not like we have a choice until the gondola comes back.”

And so, for lack of a better way to kill time, they wander. Their view of the tower is clearer once they leave the station, and that giant, hanging piece of metal makes more sense from this angle: it’s a pendulum. Or it was. It seems to have lost the bob that would have kept it swinging in the past, though where it went was anyone’s guess. In a brief, childishly fanciful moment, Xehanort imagines it simply fell off one day, rolling all the way down the street and straight into Scala’s sea.

The windmills turn as lazily here as they do in any other town. Their sails boast a thrilling rotation of light gray, gray, slightly darker gray, and near-black. Sometimes Xehanort thinks he can catch a glimpse of pink or yellow, but it’s so fleeting that he chalks it up to a trick of the light.

But even without taking the color scheme—or lack thereof—into account, the place just looks…drab. It has the same structure as every town in Scala, yet there’s something about its layout and building designs that makes it feel old-fashioned. If Xehanort knew more about architecture, he might be able to explain this sense of incongruity and maybe even rid himself of it. But he doesn’t, and so he can’t.

“Pretty quiet,” he says instead. Eraqus nods, looking around as if he’s only just noticed it himself.

“Everyone probably took a gondola to Abitus for the day,” he replies, and Xehanort snorts. More likely, Ortus is simply an uninhabited island. They’re uncommon, but not unheard of. Not every town needs to be looked after, nor are all of them sites for anything noteworthy, like Abitus. Their hometown is something of an anomaly, serving as a hallowed training ground for prospective Keyblade Masters. Few other islands in Scala carry that type of responsibility. Most of them simply exist.

The street widens into what is presumably the center of town: a small, circular area with a stone fountain in the middle. It isn’t running, but a shallow pool of water sits in the bottom. Eraqus wanders over to get a closer look while Xehanort heads for a grassy spot, noting that while the world seems vacant, at least the lawn is well-maintained.

Aside from the flowers, anyway. Had they gone to Hortus as originally intended, Xehanort would be looking at an entirely different display right now: large purple and orange fronds, tiny pink and white blossoms, and pale blue bells.

Here, the flowers—like the windmills—are gray. _Must be this world’s accent color_ , Xehanort muses. _Black and white, with a touch of gray to spruce things up. Stunning_.

The flowers are remarkably robust, though, for such fragile-looking things. They’re at the end of their life cycle, and with the petals shriveled and gone, all that remains are the spores, soft colorless tufts waiting to be swept away on the breeze. Xehanort marvels at the fact that they haven’t been already.

Something clicks. The pendulum in his own mind finally starts to swing. His gaze drifts from the flowers up to the motionless banners on the street signs, then to the limp curtains hanging just inside the open window of one of the houses.

There _is_ no breeze. From the moment they set foot in Ortus, the entire town has been holding its breath. A sudden thought crawls up Xehanort’s spine before settling, uninvited, in his brain: this world is not just uninhabited—it’s been _evacuated_.

“We should go back,” Eraqus says abruptly, and Xehanort’s gut reaction is to agree without even hearing his reason. “Probably shouldn’t get too far from the station,” Eraqus goes on, perfectly casual. “It’s kind of a long ride to begin with, and if we miss the next car…”

Xehanort doesn’t argue, and they make their way back up the street to the station. They only need to wait five minutes for the gondola, and Xehanort keeps his eyes fixed on it as it approaches. They step in together and take their time getting settled. “It’s still pretty early,” Eraqus says as he leans back against the corner of the car. “You up for going to Hortus after all?”

Xehanort looks ahead, determined to let the town shrink into the distance behind him without another glance. “Nah,” he says. “One trip per day is enough for me. I think I’m starting to get motion sickness from these things.”

Eraqus grimaces sympathetically, and they go on in silence for a while. The scent of the sea reaches them even at this height. It’s not the smell Xehanort remembers from the islands, the harsh and clarifying scent of salt. He can’t place this ocean’s smell at all. But he tries, just to give himself something to focus on. He feels as if he’s set foot somewhere he wasn’t supposed to, and now that feeling is stuck to his sole and he can’t shake it off.

It’s a feeling that’s confirmed when Eraqus says, with no preamble, “Ortus is a dead world, you know.”

A quick thrill of fear darts right to Xehanort’s core. “…what?”

Eraqus looks contemplative, as if he were simply speaking his thoughts aloud. But with Xehanort’s eyes on him, he seems to hear what he just said. “Sorry; that sounded ominous,” he says. “It’s actually one of the oldest towns in Scala. It’s been a dead world for a long time—longer than Abitus has even existed.” He smiles a little as if he said something amusing, just to lighten the tone. “I always knew it was a dead world, but I’ve never been there before today. I never really knew what it meant for a world to _be_ dead until I walked through it myself.”

Xehanort can’t say he doesn’t understand that feeling. He also understands why Eraqus is trying to dress Ortus up with facts and trivia. He’s treating it like nothing more than a fascinating piece of history, in order to cancel out the lingering unease of having walked, unknowingly, through a necropolis. So Xehanort lets him ramble on, and he tries to learn what he can about the town in the process. At the very least, it helps to recontextualize it.

He even looks back, once they’re far enough away. The town is a speck on the horizon, pale as a sunrise. He studies it until it shrinks out of existence like a snuffed candle, and right on cue, Eraqus says, “Well, enough about Ortus. Your turn.”

Xehanort glances at him, one eyebrow raised. And when Eraqus demands that Xehanort spend the remaining half of their ride entertaining him with stories about his islands, he groans. Maybe Eraqus feels like Ortus is finally giving them permission to stop talking about it as it disappears from sight. Maybe he’s attempting a kind of emotional retreat to match their physical one, turning the conversation to a world that’s familiar to at least one of them.

Or maybe he’s just being nosy.

Either way, Xehanort indulges him. Eraqus asks about the animals first, which is a natural question. Scala is home to people, fish, and a few species of birds, and not much else. Xehanort insists that most of the animals back on the islands were nothing special, either. A lot of insects. Some small green lizards that clung to tree trunks or buried themselves in the sand. He describes them as pests.

The seals are Eraqus’s favorite to hear about, because they’re a surprise. He knows from his reading that they typically live in colder climates, but Xehanort claims that he used to see monk seals on the islands, sunning themselves by the water and taking long naps throughout the afternoon. “Sound like anyone we know?” he asks, and Eraqus gives him an offended little look in response.

Aside from the dolphin pods and occasional whale, there isn’t much else to share in terms of fauna. Eraqus wasn’t expecting much to begin with, knowing that Xehanort likes to avoid talking about the world he came from. But there’s a pensive look in Xehanort’s eyes. Something is drawing him back to the islands more easily than usual, and he goes on without any prompting from Eraqus. “It was strange,” he says. “The islands were teeming with life, but they felt so stagnant. Outside of the stormy season, anyway. Sleepy animals. Content people. Quiet trees, steady tide. Just in and out, back and forth, every day. And then there was…me,” he says with a laugh, as if he’s self-explanatory. “Sometimes it felt like I was born to the wrong world.”

“Well…you have Scala now,” Eraqus offers with a small smile. Xehanort doesn’t return it, but Eraqus can tell by the way he gazes out the window that he agrees with the sentiment. “Still, though. It makes sense that you wouldn’t be homesick for a place like that.”

“I never said I wasn’t.”

“…oh,” Eraqus says, a little awkwardly. “Yeah, I mean…it’s just, you always sound like you kind of…hated it there.”

Xehanort shrugs. “I kind of did. Ever since I was little, I felt like I had this strong sense of self, or sense of purpose. But it was hard to keep that up when it felt like there was no place for me. I don’t even know what I was looking for that the islands couldn’t provide. I’m still not sure. Growing up, I just knew that I wanted…” He holds his hands on his lap, palms up, trying to summon the answer into being, then shrugs again and says, “More.”

Eraqus nods, and Xehanort smiles a little. “It’s not like the world was bland. Its sense of self was as strong as mine. We just weren’t compatible, I guess, and we were stuck with each other.” His smile broadens a bit. “You know, for such an idle place, it felt almost hostile. Those islands seemed to want me to leave as badly as I did. But I still miss them. Sometimes I wonder if they miss me, too, now that I’m finally gone.”

It might have sounded like a funny idea, but Eraqus knows as well as anyone that worlds have hearts, and wills. They possess a life of their own. They can miss a person as much as they themselves can be missed.

Xehanort has been looking out the window, and it doesn’t bother Eraqus that he’s slipped away throughout their conversation. He keeps staring at the horizon, his eyes looking farther ahead than they can see, and after watching him for a few moments, Eraqus follows his gaze. Abitus is finally visible down the line, and they complete the rest of their journey in silence.

Xehanort understands why Eraqus wanted to distract himself from their little detour. He was even grateful for the distraction, at first. But where Eraqus saw a mistaken swerve off their intended path, Xehanort sees a reminder of why he came to Scala in the first place. The visit to Ortus hasn’t slaked his desire to see new worlds, only whetted it, and now, with the revelation of Ortus’s “dead world” status, he’s already thinking about going back.

But not today. Today, he wants to return to Abitus, because while Xehanort knows the value of new discoveries, he’s also begun to learn the value of familiar comforts. The gilded excess of Abitus’s tower. The iron gates at the entrance. The colors of the windmills, which look so vivid to Xehanort this afternoon.

His wanderlust has always been a driving force, but when he steps out onto the station platform, it’s the first time he’s ever understood the relief of coming home. And when Eraqus suggests a game of chess on what Xehanort has come to think of as “their” windowsill, he readily agrees.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure there's been some explanation of what Scala ad Caelum, you know, _is_. But I've never truly understood KH and I don't intend to start now, so I'm going with my own interpretation here, which is that each island/town is the birthplace of a world, and when a world "dies," it returns to Scala, attaching to the underside of the island (as we see with a certain town in KH3). The gondola cables that connect the towns are the "lanes between." In a way, Scala can be thought of as the Final World for...worlds.  
> Incidentally, Scala might be the creepiest world in KH. It looks so nice and bright and well-maintained, but that only makes it more uncanny. It feels like a ghost town. I love it.  
> Edit: Hell yeah, Scala ad Caelum is officially a recognized KH tag.


End file.
